Advertising posts

Today kicks off New York Advertising Week, which is one of the most important and exciting weeks of the year here at AOL, and which is why I'm particularly excited to share some very significant news. As many of you know, video has been a key part of our overall strategy over the last few years, and since launching The AOL On Network in April of this year, we've seen tremendous traction in the marketplace. In August, our reach surpassed 60M unique visitors for the first time ever, and we were ranked #1 in the Auto, Business, Style, Home, Health, Travel, Technology and Food categories.

Today, we're sharing the news our entire original video content library will be distributed across 22 curated channels and monetized on YouTube. Viewers will be able to enjoy nearly 20,000 videos from their favorite AOL brands like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Moviefone; original series Beyond the Battlefield and Little Women, Big Cars; and vertical content on topics Style and Home. Ad sales will be handled by AOL's sales team, opening up a new revenue stream for the company and delivering a significant amount of brand-safe inventory for advertisers.

According to comScore's Video Metrix for August 2012, AOL and YouTube's parent company, Google, are the two largest video content properties by number of video streams per month, which means this deal brings together the two largest video properties on the web.

YouTube unveiled its new channel strategy in October of last year in an effort to bring more premium content into the mix, which means we'll be joining some of the biggest names in media including Hearst, Lionsgate, Reuters, Slate and Pitchfork. The project has been an immense success so far, with twenty of their premium channels garnering a million views per week.

We couldn't be more excited to bring our video library to a whole new audience of viewers and to contribute to a major milestone in the online video industry.

Today AOL kicked off Advertising Week 2012 with the launch of Project Devil 2, the next phase of AOL's continued focus on innovation in premium branded display.

Project Devil, launched in September 2010 at Advertising Week, was AOL's foray into revolutionizing premium display on the Web. Since then, the Devil unit has continued to deliver outstanding metrics for marketers, including an average Interaction Rate (ITR) of 5.18% and an average Interaction Time of 24 seconds.*

After two years of working with advertisers across categories including Entertainment, Retail, CPG, Finance, and Travel, we realized that each industry has very unique needs in branded display. We have been working with the various verticals to create real solutions for their needs.

One new format in Project Devil 2 has two applications within the unit, allowing brand marketers to utilize a larger high-definition brand asset in the top module to drive a more enhanced experience for consumers. For example, in Entertainment, we heard how important the video functionality was for them. So we now have the 2 app solution that allows for about 66 percent of the real estate to run a high def video.

A second new unit in Project Devil 2 is smaller 300x600 unit that features one large application. With Project Devil 2, our product strategy continues to be focused on the transformation from ad formats to vertical ad solutions.

We are also continuing to scale Project Devil across the Web. AOL also recently signed a partnership with Time Inc. around premium branded display. As part of the agreement, Time Inc. will use AOL's Pictela technology to power premium formats on their Time Amplify platform. Time Inc. will also certify Pictela for standard IAB ad units. In addition, Pictela will build a proprietary 300x600 premium ad format for Time Inc. with enhanced functionality specific to the publisher, expected later this year.

Across AOL's Owned & Operated sites, the Devil Network and 30 certified publishers, Pictela technology powers all the ad units in the IAB Standard Ad Unit Portfolio named at the IAB Annual Leadership Conference in February 2012, including Billboard, Filmstrip, Portrait, and Pushdown.

Its official – AOL scored seven Telly Awards, a top industry award honoring the best in film and video productions, groundbreaking Web commercials, videos and films and outstanding local, regional and cable TV commercials and programs. Last year, the Tellys received more than 12,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents. Winners were notified in May, but the Telly Awards organization has now announced all the winners on its site, and since May, AOL picked up another Silver win – for You've Got.

Think it's getting hot in here? That's because the first ever Devil Awards are open for voting!

As AOL's Project Devil turns two and the Devil Network continues to blaze a trail across the web, it's time to celebrate the best of the best in a great competition! Now it's up to you to vote for which brand you think should be crowned the Most Beautiful Ad, Most Engaging Ad, Best Pages to Parking Lots Ad and the Smartest Devil Ad.

The AOL Sales team has submitted what they think are the best ads in the following categories, and now we're opening it up to the public to decide who should be crowned:

Most Beautiful Ad: The best use of image and video galleries hosting eye-catching photos and videos

Most Engaging Ad: The best use of interactive ad elements like hotspots, quizzes and polls

Best Supporting Devil: The best use of Devil ad units in a larger campaign

Best Pages to Parking Lots: The ad unit that best sends users to offline commerce with the online ad campaign

Smartest Devil: The best use of Smart Apps technology that synchs user actions in one application within the ad to another